When
President George Bush and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher agreed on the
telephone in March 1989, to keep the Flight 103 investigation within
politically acceptable limits, the octopus was presented with a tricky
problem of news management.

As
the only official source of information about the disaster, as well as the
only official source of information about government business in general,
the American and British bureaucracies could count on the polite attention
of every mainstream journalist, but the story had run for months and it
was hardly possible to retract the tips, leaks, official statements and
background briefings already given.

The
consensus was that the Syrian-backed PFLP-GC had committed the atrocity
for the Iranians; that the Libyans had probably had a hand in it by
supplying the bomb components; that the individuals responsible had been
identified, and that warrants could be expected at any time.

Undoing these now inconvenient views and expectations was not going to be
easy, even without the continued meddling of congressional committees,
boards of inquiry, lawyers for both sides in the compensation dispute and
police officers still treating the case as a murder investigation. There
was also the problem of what to do with the Germans, because there was no
way of putting a suitable gloss on events without them.

At
their baldest, the new policy requirements were that Syria and, to a
lesser extent, Iran should be eased out of the picture, leaving Libya
solely to blame, but without seeming to deny or tamper with evidence
already made public and without appearing to allow expediency a higher
priority than the ruthless pursuit of justice.

Given the usually uncritical reception of 'official news' by the media,
and the patriotic reluctance of most people to believe the worst of their
own governments, this should have been possible, but the solution to the
problem rested in the hands of those who had created it in the first
place, and in the end the task was to prove beyond them.

The
first requirement was to get the Germans to cooperate, and the only way to
do that was to show that the bomb had gone aboard Flight 103 in Frankfurt
due to circumstances beyond their control.

After Detective Chief Superintendent John Orr had taken them to task in
March 1989, for dragging their feet, the BKA in April sent him the files
on the PFLP-GC cell they had broken up some eight weeks before the
disaster -- and by any reading, the circumstantial evidence against Dalkamoni, Ghadanfar and Khreesat was strong, not to say overwhelming.
Although the first two remained in custody, charged with bombing American
military trains in Germany, Khreesat and the other PFLP-GC suspects
rounded up in the raids had, unaccountably, been released -- a decision
which, on the face of it, might well have cost 270 lives.

A
possible solution was to show that the bronze Samsonite suitcase
containing the bomb had been fed into the system at some other airport,
and that it was therefore a failure on Pan Am's part which had allowed it
to go aboard Flight 103 in Frankfurt without an accompanying passenger. If
this could be 'proved', then the German authorities would be no more to
blame than the British at Heathrow, who had also allowed the bag to be
transferred from one aircraft to another for the trans-Atlantic leg of the
flight.

To
make this version of events plausible, a few awkward facts had first to be
smoothed over. There could be no suggestion, for instance, that Frankfurt
was the European hub of a 'controlled delivery' pipeline for drugs in
transit from the Middle East. There could be no suggestion that 'clean'
suitcases, properly checked through, were routinely switched in the
baggage-handling area with 'dirty' suitcases containing heroin en route to
the United States. There could be no reports of 'suspicious activity' in
the baggage-handling area before Flight 103 left Frankfurt on 21 December.
Nor could there be any videotapes available from the security cameras in
the baggage-handling area.

A
good deal of embarrassing speculation had already been made public. On 30
July 1989, for instance, the Observer, in London, had published an
'exclusive' under the headline: 'Lockerbie: Turks "planted bomb."

Reviewing the results of a 'three-month inquiry' into the disaster, the
report said the paper had

obtained specific
information from a range of Middle East sources who have told us that
Turkish nationals were brought into the plot to bomb the Pan Am Boeing 747
at the end of September last year ... Contact is said to have been made,
on the instructions of a German-based Iranian diplomat, by a member of the
PFLP-GC ...

According to our
sources, five Turks were entrusted with the task of planting the bomb on
the Pan Am plane ... One has been described as a 'young Turkish engineer'
and it is this man who is said to have physically planted a suitcase
containing the bomb inside a cargo container on the London-bound Boeing
727 ...

German officials who
questioned airport workers after the bombing have refused either to
support or dismiss this account. American intelligence agencies want to
reexamine and trace all likely suspects, but they appear to have received
little cooperation from the Germans. The 'engineer' allegedly left Germany
for Beirut via Cyprus shortly after the bombing.

What
was needed to divert attention away from Frankfurt into politically safer
channels was some 'new' evidence, preferably linked to the hard forensic
evidence that had already been established and which, by association,
would lend credibility to it. And as the police officers engaged in the
field investigation could not be counted upon to cooperate in a political
fix, that evidence had to be 'found' in a plausible way, even at the cost
of further inter-agency bickering.

On
17 August 1989, eight months after the disaster, Chief Detective
Superintendent John Orr received from the BKA what was said to be a
computer print-out of the baggage-loading list for Pan Am Flight 103A from
Frankfurt to London on the afternoon of 21 December 1988. Attached to this
were two internal reports, dated 2 February 1989, describing the inquiries
that BKA officers had made about the baggage-handling system at the
airport. Also provided were two worksheets, one typewritten, the other
handwritten, that were said to have been prepared on 21 December by
airport workers at key points on the conveyor-belt network.

In
the margin of the computer print-out, a penciled cross drew particular
attention to bag number B8849 - that is the 8849th bag to be logged into
the computerized system at Terminal B that day. By reference to the
worksheets, B8849 could be shown to have arrived in Frankfurt by a
scheduled Air Malta flight from Luqa airport and to have been 'interlined'
through to Flight 103. But neither the Air Malta nor the Pan Am passenger
lists showed anybody who had booked a through flight from Luqa to New York
that day. In other words, bag B8849 had arrived from Malta unaccompanied
but tagged for New York and had been loaded aboard Flight 103 without
being matched with a passenger. And as the job of matching bags with
passengers is the responsibility of the airline, not of the airport
authorities or of the host government, Pan Am had plainly been guilty of
lax security amounting to 'wilful misconduct'.

This
tied in nicely with the forensic evidence, which had already shown that
the bomb had been hidden in a Samsonite suitcase filled with an assortment
of clothing made in Malta, including a baby's blue romper suit.

Less
than three months after the disaster, in March 1989, two Scottish police
officers had flown out to the island to interview the manufacturer of the
romper suit but had drawn blank. At least 500 of them had been sold to
babywear outlets all over Europe. To trace the purchaser of the suit that
had been all but destroyed in the explosion was clearly impossible. Now,
with the baggage records pointing to a suitcase originating in Malta, the
field of search was dramatically narrowed.

Two
weeks after the BKA released the Frankfurt baggage print-out, two of
Detective Chief Superintendent John Orr's men returned to Malta and, with
the help of the manufacturers, traced the clothing to a shop in Sliema.

As
'luck' would have it, the proprietors not only remembered selling the
exact items which the forensic team had shown were used as packing around
the bomb but remembered the date on which they had sold them, 23 November
1988, a month before the bombing; remembered the purchaser -- a Libyan,
they thought -- and, ten months after the event, remembered what he looked
like clearly enough to brief an FBI video-fit artist to produce an
acceptable likeness to Abu Talb of the PFLP-GC, who was known to have
visited Malta not long before the bombing.

Leaving the shopkeepers guarded around the clock by security men, the
police officers returned home with their questions answered so neatly that
in other circumstances they might have been forgiven for suspecting the
witnesses had been coached.

Never mind that Air Malta, the Maltese police and the Maltese government
categorically denied that any baggage, unaccompanied or otherwise, had
been put aboard Air Malta flight KM180 to connect with Pan Am 103 in
Frankfurt on 21 December 1988, and never mind that the airline's
record-keeping showed this to be so -- as David Leppard of The Sunday Times
pointed out later, if the fatal bag 'had been smuggled on to the flight
unaccompanied, it must have bypassed Luqa's baggage control system. No one
could blame the airline company for the criminal activities of a terrorist
gang.'

He
was not prepared to exercise the same understanding for Pan Am in
Frankfurt, however. 'Under international airline rules, bags unaccompanied
by passengers should never be allowed on to aircraft,' he wrote
(erroneously) in The Sunday Times of 29 October 1989. 'The new evidence
casts serious doubt on the theory that the bomb was placed on board in
Frankfurt and carried by an unwitting passenger who died in the crash.'

Leppard did not address the possibility that the bomb might have
'bypassed' Pan Am's baggage-control system at Frankfurt in the same way as
he suggested it might have bypassed Air Malta's at Luqa; nor did the
Independent, in London, two days later.

'Police investigating the Lockerbie bombing,' the paper reported, 'have
confirmed they are investigating whether the bomb was first placed aboard
an airliner in Malta, and then transferred to the Pan Am flight even
though it had no accompanying passenger.' The story went on to quote a
spokesman for the BKA as saying 'there are clues that a suitcase from
Malta may have played a part. There are also clues that someone from Libya
-- or at least, someone with a Libyan accent -- may have bought the items.'

John
Orr declined to comment.

With
this sensational breakthrough in the case, everybody but Pan Am and its
insurers were off the hook. If the world could be persuaded to buy this
scenario, then the responsibility would be shifted from the Iranians and
Syrians to the Libyans, to the obvious benefit of Western foreign policy,
not least in its attempts to secure the release of Western hostages in the
Middle East; the security and police forces of the United States, Germany
and the United Kingdom would be seen to be blameless, and the families of
the victims would have a clear shot at a clear target in seeking proper
compensation for their loss.

But
there were problems.

The
weight of circumstantial evidence against the PFLP-GC unit in Germany was
still impressive and not to be wished away. If the bomb had been built
there by Marwan Khreesat and hidden in the copper-coloured Samsonite
suitcase that he had brought with him from Damascus, how did it get into
the hands of the Libyans in Malta?

And
why? It was winter time, when flight delays and missed connections were
commonplace. Was it likely that any well-organized, well-funded, seriously
determined terrorist group, capable of building a sophisticated explosive
device to blow up an American aircraft over the Atlantic, would choose to
put it aboard the target flight by sending it, unaccompanied, in a
suitcase that had first to be smuggled on to an Air Malta flight (which
might have been delayed or diverted) to Frankfurt (where it might have
been mislaid or misrouted), in the hope that Pan Am would fail to search
it or match it with a passenger and forward it, unaccompanied, on a feeder
flight (which might also have been delayed or diverted) to Heathrow
(where again it might have been misplaced or misdirected), still in the
hope that no one would notice or examine the suitcase before it was
finally loaded aboard the third, and target, aircraft for the New York leg
of the flight?

As
this is still the official view, such a plan must surely represent the
most conspicuous victory of optimism over elementary common sense in the
annals of terrorism. On the face of it, the PFLP-GC would have been better
advised to post their bomb to the United States as a registered air
parcel.

More
particularly, there were problems with the computer records and worksheets
from Frankfurt. For one thing, they did not tally with Pan Am's own
baggage records, which although questionable as to their accuracy, were at
least compiled in good faith. To this day no one knows exactly how many
pieces of luggage there were aboard the doomed flight or consequently
whether they have all been recovered or accounted for. Nobody even knows
exactly how many suitcases were in the luggage pallet that contained the
one with the bomb -- it was 45 or 46 -- or how many of these were brought in
by the feeder flight from Frankfurt. (The number was also thought to
include not one but four unaccompanied bags.)

The
BKA estimate that 'about' 135 bags were sent through to the baggage room
below the departure gate of Flight 103A, some belonging to the 79
passengers whose journey ended in London and the rest to the 49 who were
going on to New York. There were no records of luggage sent directly to
the departure gate, nor of interline luggage taken directly from one
aircraft to another, nor of bags belonging to first-class passengers.

Of
the 49 passengers bound for New York and beyond, 28 began their journey in
Frankfurt, and 21 transferred from other connecting flights. As with the
other interline passengers who joined the flight in London, their luggage
was X-rayed before it went aboard but no attempt was made to match baggage
with passengers, even though it had already been established that the Semtex explosive in the PFLP-GC Toshiba radio bombs was virtually
undetectable by X-ray examination alone. (Later on, it would emerge that
the X-ray machine operator had been instructed to pull out any bag that
appeared to contain a radio. According to his testimony, he X-rayed 13
bags but none contained anything resembling a Toshiba radio.)

Of
the 135 bags mentioned by the BKA, 111 had been logged on the Frankfurt
computer and about 24 taken directly to the aircraft from three other
connecting Pan Am flights. The list compiled by Pan Am at its check-in
desks, however, showed not 111 but 117 items of luggage, and the
discrepancy has not been convincingly cleared up to this day.

Although the 'discovery' of an unaccompanied bag from Malta was seized
upon as a breakthrough in the investigation, there were in fact 13 items
of unaccompanied luggage on the flight. According to the minutes of the
fourth international conference of police agencies called on 14 September
1989, to consider the new Libyan link with the bombing, this cast 'doubt
on the total reliability of hand-written entries of the baggage handlers
on the computer print-out,' which had indicated only one such item.
Details of the Malta connections were discussed, 'and it was explained
that the bomb need not have been brought on in Malta, but must at least
have come from Frankfurt'.

Well, they said it. Given that the flight wreckage was picked over
initially by the CIA, that the total number of bags loaded aboard is not
known, that the remains of others may yet be found in the wilder reaches
of the Kielder Forest and the Scottish border country, and that there is
still no reliable manifest for Flight 103 listing all the passengers by
name with their seat numbers and baggage -- given all this uncertainty, to
suggest that the theory of a suicide bomber or of an unwitting 'mule' had
been eliminated or that the baggage could not have been tampered with at
Frankfurt or Heathrow or that the investigation had accounted for every
piece of luggage on board and, except for the bag from Malta, matched
every piece to a passenger is, to say the least, unpersuasive.

Indeed, the claims are almost as unconvincing as the provenance of the
crucial computer listing itself.

If
the new Malta/Libyan theory was to replace the established Iran/PFLP-GC
scenario, it was necessary, first of all, to believe that no one thought
to ask for the baggage-loading lists for Flight 103A as soon as terrorist
action was suspected -- which was almost at once.

It
was necessary to believe that no one in any of the British, German and
American police, intelligence and accident inquiry agencies who had a hand
in investigating the disaster, or anyone who was in any way involved with
airport management or security at Frankfurt or London, thought to secure
the baggage lists as the one indispensable tool that would be needed to
unravel the mystery of how the bomb got aboard.

It
was necessary to believe that the only person who considered the lists to
be at all important was a lowly computer operator at Frankfurt airport.

The
Observer's chief reporter, John Merritt, described how this came about in
a story published almost two years after the disaster.

He
wrote, on 17 November 1991:

A major breakthrough
in the hunt for the Lockerbie bombers came to light only because of the
quick thinking of a conscientious computer operator at Frankfurt airport.

The vital computer
evidence, proving conclusively that the bag from Malta, identified as Item
B8849, was on board as the airliner was blasted apart on the last stage of
its journey from Heathrow to New York would have been lost forever if the
woman operator had not kept her own record.

Acting on her own
initiative, the woman, an employee of the Frankfurt Airport Company, who
for legal reasons cannot be named, was working at the computer system
known as KIK on the day of the disaster. She knew records relating to
baggage loaded on to flights were kept in the system for only a limited
time [eight days] before being wiped. So when she returned to work the
next day she made her own print-out of the information and placed it in
her locker before going on holiday.

On her return, weeks
later, she was surprised to learn that no one had shown any interest in
the computer records. She passed the print-out to her baggage section
leader who gave it to investigators from the West German Bundeskriminalamt.
But it was not until mid-August, eight months after the bombing, that the
German authorities turned over this information to Scottish police in
charge of the investigation.

The woman employee's
role became known only last week when lawyers for families of the American
victims took evidence from her in Germany. She had kept her own copy of
the print-out and still had it in her locker.

The
Observer's readiness to print this story contrasted sharply with its
scepticism when Pan Am subpoenaed the CIA and five other US government
agencies in the US District Court for 'all documents concerning warnings,
tips, alerts and other communications as to plans by any person to place a
bomb, make an assault or commit another form of terrorist attack at
Frankfurt airport during November or December 1988'.

The
request seemed reasonable enough, given that the airline and its insurers
were facing damage lawsuits totaling some $7 billion, and possibly as
much again in punitive damages, but it was instantly dismissed as a
fishing expedition when it became known, five weeks after the subpoenas
were served, that Pan Am was seeking through the courts to compel the US
government to produce the documents necessary for its defence.

This
step had been prompted by the now notorious Interfor Report commissioned
by the airline from Juval Aviv, whose inquiries into the disaster had
produced intelligence information that was sometimes more reliable than
the conclusions he drew from it. When copies of the report were leaked to
the press and to Congressman James Traficant, a member of the House
Aviation Committee who was then seeking re-election, its findings captured
media attention across the world.

In
vain, Pan Am protested that it was embarrassed by the leak of its
confidential report (which was certainly doing the airline's position no
good at all) and, in vain, did its spokesman insist that: 'We are not
supporting the findings, neither are we suggesting that they are nonsense.
What we are trying to do is establish what is fact and what is fiction.
That is why we asked for the subpoenas.'

No
sooner had the furor died down than the Observer weighed in on 26
November with the results of a 'Special Investigation':

In
marked contrast to the sympathetic hearing the paper was later to give the
story of how the computer baggage-list came to light in Frankfurt, its
reporting team fastened on the Interfor Report and its author like piranha
fish.

An investigator's
report which claims that the CIA allowed terrorists to place the bomb on
board Pan Am Flight 103 is today exposed as a sham, following an
investigation by the Observer [it announced]. Pan Am's insurers
commissioned the report from an Israeli intelligence expert based in New
York. As a result of his findings, the airline issued subpoenas demanding
information from the CIA and five other US intelligence agencies ... As
the agencies will strenuously contest any attempt to force information
from them, Pan Am will be able to argue it was prevented from presenting a
complete case.

And
why not? Why would the agencies 'strenuously' contest the subpoenas if
their hands were clean and they could prove the airline was wrong?

Described as 'incredible', 'unbelievable' and 'bizarre', the Interfor
Report was summarized in the context of interviews with Juval Aviv -- 'a
chubby Donald Pleasance, wearing a grey suit and a Gucci watch, -- and
Congressman Traficant -- a 'former sheriff, who was once accused by Federal
tax inspectors of accepting $108,000 in bribes from organized crime
figures.'

When
the Observer team met with Aviv, 'he failed to provide any evidence to
substantiate a single claim in his report.' And when Traficant was told
that there were 'serious doubts about the report', he suggested the
Observer might be working for the CIA. When pressed, Mr. Traficant said:
"'You've come here a day late, a dime short and you're a piece of shit."
The Observer made its excuses and left.'

In
the Observer's summary, the Interfor Report claimed

... that an
autonomous CIA unit based in Frankfurt, West Germany, struck a deal with a
Syrian drugs dealer with terrorist connections [Monzer al-Kassar]. He was
supposedly allowed to smuggle heroin into the United States in return for
helping to negotiate the release of American hostages in Beirut. Knowing
of his 'protected' route, the bombers used his network to place the device
on board the plane. It also alleges that warnings that Flight 103 was the
target of a terrorist attack were suppressed because they would have
exposed the 'drugs-for-hostages' deal ...

On first reading,
the report is a detailed and strictly factual account of a complex plot to
strike back at the US for the downing of an Iranian airliner over the Gulf
in July 1988. Many of its facts are true, but they have no link with
Lockerbie. Other details do not stand up to close examination. The report
is riddled with errors.

The
Observer team then itemized the errors they had found and the details
which did not stand up to close examination.

1.
The report claimed that al Kassar had rented a car in Paris and driven to
Frankfurt with components of the bomb. On examining the records of the
rental firm for the day in question, 'No car hired on that date clocked up
sufficient mileage to have made the trip.'

2.
The report claimed that 'Corea' was the code name for the
drugs-for-hostages deal. 'But Corea actually refers to communications
between members of Trevi, the group of European intelligence, customs and
police forces set up to monitor "terrorism, revolution and violence".'

3.
The report claimed that documents proving Pan Am's case were held in the
safe of Kurt Rebmann, 'a West German equivalent of an assistant attorney
general, based in Berlin'. This was denied by Mr Rebmann, 'who is, in
fact, a Federal prosecutor based in Karlsruhe'.

And
that was it, apart from other unspecified 'facts' that appeared 'to have
been cobbled together from newspaper cuttings, many of which have turned
out to be wrong'. On the strength of these revelations, which seem little
enough to warrant such a conclusion, the Interfor Report was never again
to be referred to in the public prints, either in Britain or the United
States, without being described as 'discredited' or 'a sham'.

Aviv
may have failed to provide the Observer with any additional evidence to
support his findings, but equally the Observer failed to provide any solid
evidence to refute them, despite the obvious pains it had taken. It was
also a little ungrateful of the paper to attack him so vigorously, for in
his preamble to the report, Aviv had spoken of crossing the trail of
several other private investigations into the Flight 103 disaster, notably
those of the Observer and The Sunday Times but 'only the Observer', he
wrote, 'seems to continue trying to identify how the act was done and by
whom.'

The
Sunday Times was less dismissive of Aviv's work, although its reporter,
David Leppard, agreed that 'the report at first appears so fantastic as to
be ridiculous. Almost all the agencies involved have denied it. The CIA
called it "nonsense"; one intelligence source said it was "fantasy". But
the report, however bizarre, does contain remarkable detail, including
names, dates, times of meetings, telephone and bank account numbers.'

The
Interfor Report was commissioned by James M. Shaughnessy, of the New York
law firm, Windels, Marx, Davies & Ives, who was acting for Pan Am as lead
counsel in its defence of the liability suit. The report was an internal
document, summarizing mostly unverifiable intelligence data collected in
the field, designed to open up lines of inquiry that might lead to the
discovery of evidence admissible in court, which the report self-evidently
was not. Aviv began work in the spring of 1989 and when his findings were
submitted to Shaughnessy on 15 September they provided the basis for the
subpoenas served shortly afterwards on the CIA, the DEA and other
government agencies.

The
leakage of the report to Congressman Traficant and the press some six
weeks later was a severe setback for Pan Am's legal team -- indeed, the
embarrassment it caused was so acute that conspiracy buffs might well have
suspected the US Justice Department itself of leaking the report. A US
magistrate thought otherwise, however. Amid a blizzard of media
speculation, an evidentiary hearing was ordered, at which John Merritt of
the Observer was questioned, and, after hearing the testimony, the
magistrate concluded that Aviv's denial of having leaked the report was
'not credible'.

After defining its terms of reference -- which had nothing to do with
exculpating Pan Am, as was widely suggested even by those who had read
them, but was 'to determine the facts and then to identify the sources,
nature, extent, form and quality of available evidence' -- the report
reviewed the results of the official investigation to date and the
theories then current as to who was responsible ... Then followed a review
and assessment of the anonymous intelligence sources who had contributed
to Aviv's findings, rated on a scale of reliability from 'good' to
'excellent'. In some cases, their anonymity was barely skin-deep. 'Source
5', for example, rated 'excellent', was described as 'an experienced
director of airport security for the most security-conscious airline'.

Next
came a 'Background History' to the disaster, starting two years
beforehand, in which the politics and principal players were put in
context. Libya's leader, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, 'a major funder of
terrorism', was said to have demanded better coordination among terrorist
groups, and better 'deniability' for himself, with the result that the Abu
Nidal group took over drugs and arms smuggling while Ahmed Jibril's PFLP-GC,
backed by Syrian intelligence as its 'front team', concentrated on arms
and terrorism.

Nidal's partner was Monzer al-Kassar, a Syrian arms and drugs smuggler,
married to Raghda Dubah, sister of Ali Issa Dubah, then chief of Syrian
intelligence, and a close associate of Rifat Assad, Syrian overlord of the
Lebanese heroin industry and brother of Syria's President Hafez Assad. Al-Kassar's
mistresses in Paris included Raja al-Assad, Rifat Assad's daughter, and a
former Miss Lebanon who had previously been married to two prominent
terrorists -- most recently to a friend of Nidal's, Abu Abbas, who had
planned the Achille Lauro hijacking.

Al-Kassar
had many passports and identities, which Aviv listed in his report by
serial number and date and place of issue, and operated through cover
companies and offices, also listed by address and phone numbers, in
Tripoli, Warsaw and Berlin. One of the principal drugs/arms smuggling
routes ran through Frankfurt, with Pan Am being the favoured carrier.
Tipped about what was going on, 'reportedly by a jealous Jibril', the BKA,
in cooperation with the CIA and the DEA, began to monitor the operation
and infiltrated 'at least two agents as well as informers, one of whom was
Marwan Khreesat', the PFLP-GC's ace bomb-builder.

Aviv's Interfor Report went on:

The Pan Am Frankfurt
smuggling operation worked as follows: an accomplice boarded flights with
checked luggage containing innocent items. An accomplice Turkish baggage
handler for Pan Am was tipped to identify the suitcase, then switched it
with an identical piece holding contraband which he had brought into the
airport or otherwise received there from another accomplice. The passenger
accomplice then picked up the baggage on arrival. It is not known how this
method passed through arrival customs, where such existed, but this route
and method worked steadily and smoothly for a long time ...

Khalid Jafaar was a
regular 'passenger' accomplice for the drug route.

The
BKA/DEA/CIA surveillance continued to monitor the route without
interfering with it, according to the report, and by visibly increasing
the police presence in other locations, the team sought to focus drug
smuggling through Pan Am's baggage area at Frankfurt. The reason for this
was mainly convenience, as it was already under close watch by the CIA
because of cargo shipments via Pan Am to and from the Eastern bloc through
Frankfurt, Berlin and Moscow.

In
Aviv's opinion, the CIA team concerned with this operation was not closely
supervised. 'It appears that it eventually operated to some, or a large,
extent as an internal covert operation without consistent oversight, a la
Oliver North ... To distinguish what it knew as opposed to what CIA HQ
definitely knew, we refer to that unit as CIA-1.'

In
March 1988, the report went on, the CIA team was advised by the BKA of a
secret meeting in Vienna between delegations from France and Iran that led
to the delivery of weapons to Iran in exchange for the release of French
hostages held in Lebanon. Having identified Monzer al-Kassar as a key
player in the deal, BKA/CIA-1 approached him to see if he could also help
arrange the release of American hostages in return for their protection of
his drug routes.

According to Aviv, al-Kassar not only agreed to this but helped the CIA
'in sending weapons ostensibly to Iran ... supposedly to further the US
hostage release', and also used his arms routes to supply weapons to the
Contras in Nicaragua, sometimes financing the shipments out of his drug
profits. For these and other services, he was designated a CIA
'capability', which meant that he and his business activities were then
virtually immune from interference.

'It
is believed that US Customs at JFK were ordered by CIA to allow certain
baggage to pass uninspected due to national security interests. Thus the
drug-smuggling operation was now secure.'

That
was in the summer of 1988, at about the same time as a special team of
counter-terrorist agents led by Matthew Kevin Gannon, the CIA's deputy
station chief in Beirut, and Major Charles Dennis McKee, of the Defense
Intelligence Agency, left for Beirut 'to reconnoitre and prepare for a
possible hostage rescue'.

Against this background, Aviv now set out the sequence of events leading
up to the bombing of Flight 103 as described by his sources.

On
13 December 1988, Jibril met with Khalid Jafaar and a Libyan bomb-maker
known as 'the Professor' in Bonn -- 'sources speculate that Jafaar was
offered money to make a private drug run to raise money "for the cause".'
The 'passenger accomplice' was now lined up. But the BKA's raids on the
PFLP-GC cell in late October had made it necessary for another bomb to be
brought in, and Aviv asserts that al Kassar took care of this personally.

'His
brother Ghassan's wife, Nabile Wehbe, traveling on a South Yemen
diplomatic passport, flew from Damascus to Sofia on 13 November 1988,
picked up the bomb components from [Ali] Racep and then flew to Paris. Al-Kassar
picked up the bomb from her, and on 25 November 1988, rented a car from
Chafic Rent-a-Car, 46 Rue Pierre Charron in Paris and drove to Frankfurt
(carrying other contraband as well). He had previously been arrested twice
by West German border guards but each time was suddenly released after a
telephone call was made. Sources speculate that he apparently felt secure
because he had "protection".' (The Observer, which later discovered that Chafic
had no record of any such rental transaction, also managed to reach al-Kassar by telephone in Syria. Not unnaturally, he insisted he
had been somewhere else at the time.)

Aviv's report went on to list the warnings that began to come in from the
beginning of December 1988.

The
first, from a Mossad agent about three weeks before the disaster, was to
the effect that a major terrorist attack was planned at Frankfurt airport
against an American-flag carrier. This warning was passed to CIA HQ and
BKA HQ. The local CIA team is said to have suggested that the BKA visibly
secure all the American carriers except Pan Am so that the threat, if it
was genuine, would be focused on an airline and airport area already
under close surveillance.

The
second warning, on or just before 18 December, came from associates of
Nidal and al- Kassar, who wanted to save their protected drug route
without seeming to lack zeal in the cause of militant Islam.

Having 'figured out the most likely flights for Jibril's bomb ... they
tipped BKA that a bomb would be placed on this regular Pan Am
Frankfurt-London-New York flight in the next three days. They figured that
BKA would increase visible security, thus dissuading Jibril in case that
was in fact his target. So, two to three days before the disaster, and
unwittingly, these terrorists tipped off the authorities to what proved to
be the very act.'

The
third warning, a follow-up of the second, was issued by CIA HQ, 'which
sent warnings to various embassies, etc., but not apparently to Pan Am.
CIA-1 thought that BKA surveillance would pick up the action and that BKA
would stop the act in case the tip was correct.

Meanwhile, al-Kassar had learned that the Gannon-McKee official hostage
team in Beirut had found out about his relationship with the CIA unit in
Germany and his protected drugs/arms smuggling route through Frankfurt.
According to Aviv, the official team had advised CIA HQ of what was going
on and when no action was taken to put a stop to it, Gannon and McKee
decided to return home, outraged that their lives and rescue mission
should have been put at risk by CIA-1's deal with al-Kassar.

'Al Kassar contacted his CIA-1 handlers sometime in the third week of
December,' the Interfor Report went on, 'communicated the latest news and
travel information and asked for help. There were numerous communications
between CIA-1 and its Control (in Washington).'

The
fourth warning came two or three days before the disaster. A BKA
undercover agent reported a plan to bomb a Pan Am flight 'in the next few
days' and the tip was passed on to the local CIA team. Though anxious not
'to blow its surveillance operation and undercover penetration or to risk
the al-Kassar hostage release operation', the warning was passed on and
the State Department advised its embassies. As a result, BKA security was
tightened even further around all the American carriers operating out of
Frankfurt except Pan Am. Observing this, Jibril scratched American
Airlines as his preferred target and finally selected Pan Am.

'We
do not know exactly when this decision was made,' wrote Aviv, 'but the
dates point to two or three days before the flight ... Jibril, through an
intermediary, activated the Jafaar /Turkish baggage-handler connection via
Pan Am. For the Turk and Jafaar, this was another normal drug run. Jafaar
does not profile as a suicidal martyr type.'

The
fifth warning, from an undercover Mossad agent 24 hours before take-off,
was of a plan to put a bomb aboard Pan Am Flight 103 on 21 December. BKA
passed this to CIA-1 who reported it to Control.

'The
bomb was ready,' Aviv's report went on. 'Within 24-48 hours before the
flight, a black Mercedes had parked in the airport lot and the Turkish
baggage-handler picked up a suitcase from that auto and took it into the
airport and placed it in the employee locker area. This was his usual
practice with drugs.'

The
sixth warning came from a BKA surveillance agent watching the Pan Am
baggage loading about an hour before take-off on 21 December. According to
Aviv's sources, he noticed that

... the 'drug'
suitcase substituted was different in make, shape, material and color from
that used for all previous drug shipments. This one was a brown Samsonite
case. He, like the other BKA agents on the scene, had been extra alert due
to all the bomb tips ... He phoned in a report as to what he had seen,
saying something was very wrong.

BKA passed that
information to CIA-1. It reported to its Control. Control replied: 'Don't
worry about it. Don't stop it. Let it go.'

CIA-1 issued no
instructions to BKA.

BKA did nothing.

The BKA was then
covertly videotaping that area on that day. A videotape was made. It shows
the perpetrator in the act. It was held by BKA. A copy was made and given
to CIA-1. The BKA tape has been 'lost'. However, the copy exists at CIA-1
Control in the US.

Jafaar boarded the
flight after checking one piece of luggage. The suitcase first emerged
from hiding and was placed on the luggage cart in substitution for
Jafaar's only after all the checked suitcases had already passed through
security. The suitcase was so switched by the Turkish Pan Am baggage
loader ...

The special,
designated communications codename which BKA/CIA-1 had set up for their
operations as described above is known at CIA HQ as 'COREA'. All
communications concerning the surveillance operation and as described
above as between or among BKNCIA-1 and CIA-1 Control were made via COREA.
Thus all documents concerning all communications described above ought to
be marked at the top COREA.

This completes the
recitation of intelligence as to the act.

After listing other possibly useful details, such as the banks and account
numbers used by al-Kassar, President Hafez Assad, Abu Abbas and Ali Issa
Dubah to deposit their drug revenues in Spain, Switzerland, Austria,
Beirut and Damascus, the Interfor Report declared

... it is our firm
conclusion and opinion that our sources are correct as to why, how, where,
when, by whom and what act was committed, and who had what prior warnings
and when and what they did about it ...

From the perspective
of intelligence analysis, our findings are conclusive. From the
perspective of journalists, it is publishable speculation. From the
perspective of trial lawyers, it probably remains inadmissible speculation
or hearsay. Fortunately, the intelligence provides leads to admissible
evidence. The videotape is the gem. But all the evidence is guarded by
formidable constraints. Only carefully planned and tenaciously and
narrowly pursued efforts will make acquisition possible.

The
remaining six pages of the report consisted of Interfor's practical
recommendations as to how Shaughnessy should proceed in seeking to obtain
that evidence, including the issue of discovery subpoenas.

In
the light of affidavits sworn to later by Lester Coleman and many other
witnesses and investigators, the Interfor Report -- a confidential document
never intended for public consumption -- can be challenged more for errors
of interpretation than errors of fact (although there were probably more
of the latter than the Observer was able to find).

Lester Coleman believes that, by grouping the CIA agents in Germany
together under the designation of CIA-1, Aviv endowed them with a
collective, conspiratorial purpose which almost certainly did not exist,
and that he entirely omitted the contribution to the Flight 103 disaster
of the US Drug Enforcement Administration and its country office in
Cyprus.

With
the sinister expansion of 'narco-terrorism' everywhere in the world during
the 1970s and 1980s, the work of the two agencies overseas had become ever
more closely entwined, with the CIA emerging as the senior partner in view
of its superior resources, its loftier purpose and its greater freedom of
covert action. As often as not, the requirements of narcotics law
enforcement were subordinate to those of foreign policy and national
security, as defined in Washington but reinterpreted by the octopus in the
light of changing local circumstances.

In
Coleman's view, the Lockerbie disaster was not the consequence of a malign
conspiracy by a rogue CIA team in Germany -- as many assumed Aviv was
saying from a careless reading of the Interfor Report -- but the result of
misguided decisions and misplaced confidence in their own abilities on the
part of a loose alliance of US government agents in the field, often
working with different agendas and priorities, and always without adequate
supervision, on an ad hoc, day-to-day basis.

It
was only after the event, in his opinion, that Washington engaged in a
deliberate conspiracy, and that was to avoid the potentially disastrous
political fall-out from Lockerbie by covering up the incompetence,
complacency and bravado that had let the terrorists through.

Aviv
was also perhaps confused by his sources' reference to COREA, a matter the
Observer seized upon in its attack on the Interfor Report. COREA may well
have referred to communications within the Trevi group, as the paper
suggested, but as Coleman pointed out later, it could also have been a
mishearing of khouriah, a Lebanese slang word for 'shit', which is, in
turn, the international slang word for heroin.

With
the media only too happy to savage Aviv's report as a device to allow Pan
Am to escape its obligations, the government was under no necessity to
descend into the arena and battle it out line by line.

'Garbage,' said the CIA.

'Rubbish,' said British intelligence.

'We
never received any credible threat against Flight 103 on 21 December or
any other date,' said the State Department, diplomatically hedging its
bets with the weasel word 'credible'.

With
the report made public, Juval Aviv's usefulness to Pan Am as an
investigator was virtually at an end, a consequence he might have foreseen
if he had, indeed, leaked it to the press. In an attempt to flesh out its
findings with hard evidence, he met Shaughnessy with a polygrapher, James
Keefe, in Frankfurt in January 1990, and interviewed the three Pan Am
baggage-handlers who, on 21 December 1988, were thought to have been in a
position to put the suitcase bomb aboard Flight 103.

They
were Kilin Caslan Tuzcu, a German national of Turkish origin, who had been
in charge of incoming baggage; Roland O'Neill, a German who had taken his
American wife's maiden name, and was load master for the flight, and
Gregory Grissom. All three voluntarily submitted to polygraph
examinations.

Tuzcu was tested three times, O'Neill and Grissom twice. On reporting the
results to the Scottish police, Shaughnessy was asked to sign a statement
about the tests in the presence of an FBI agent, and readily agreed. The
only visible result, however, was that, upon his return to the United
States, James Keefe, the polygrapher, was served with a subpoena at
Kennedy airport to appear before a Federal grand jury in Washington.

When
he did so, he testified that Tuzcu 'was not truthful when he said he did
not switch the suitcases'. And in Keefe's opinion, 'Roland O'Neill wasn't
truthful when he stated he did not see the suitcase being switched, and
when he stated that he did not know what was in the switched suitcase.' He
thought the Grissom results were inconclusive.

A
second polygrapher brought in by Shaughnessy to review Keefe's findings
agreed with his interpretation of Tuzcu's and Grissom's tests but found
those on O'Neill inconclusive. (Grissom was later eliminated from Pan Am's
inquiries when it was shown he had been out on the tarmac at the time.)

The
interest displayed by the FBI in the fact of Pan Am's polygraph tests
rather than in the results was not shared by the British authorities,
however. Convinced that the Scottish police would wish to interview Tuzcu
and O'Neill on the strength of this lead, the airline found a pretext to
send them to London so that they could be questioned and, if necessary,
detained, but nobody seemed in the least bit interested. After hanging
around all day, they returned to Frankfurt that night. (Intelligence
sources suggested later that O'Neill was an undercover BKA agent, which,
if true, might account for the lack of British and American interest.
Otherwise, it must be assumed that the British investigators were as
committed as the Americans to the politically more convenient theory that
the bomb had arrived unaccompanied from Malta.)

Predictably, the results of the polygraph tests were leaked to the press,
and just as predictably, on 28 January, the Observer heaped scorn on the
airline's initiative: 'Both the timing of the pair's interrogation [by
polygraph] and the circumstances surrounding it have refueled suspicions
about Pan Am methods in defending the lawsuit brought by relatives of the
270 people who died when Flight 103 was blown up over Lockerbie.'

Unable to resist having another tilt at the Interfor Report, which 'was
exposed as a sham by the Observer two months ago', the paper went on to
say that the report 'weaves a fantastical tale around the assertion that
the CIA, operating a drugs-for-hostages deal through Frankfurt airport,
allowed the bomb to proceed, thus overriding or corrupting the airline's
own security controls'.

Whether that was a fair statement of Juval Aviv's position or not -- he
still believes that Tuzcu and O'Neill are prime suspects in the mass
murder -- it was certainly typical of the prevailing view that Pan Am was
indulging in spy-fiction fantasy to pervert the course of justice.

But
in the scale of probabilities, was it any more likely that the management
and staff of a major international airline, its insurance underwriters and
the best legal brains that money could buy would seek to evade the
legitimate claims of the victims' families and counter the determination
of three governments to pin all the blame on Pan Am by inventing a fairy
tale?

Is
it any more fantastic than Aviv's report to think that they would hire,
not just Aviv, but a small army of investigators to run around the world
looking for some shred of happenstance to clothe that invention?

Or
that they would persevere with it for years in the face of almost
universal condemnation and ridicule and at a cost of millions of dollars
in the hope that one day they would find someone like Lester Coleman, who
might transmute some of that fantasy into fact?